Award Data

Carbon dioxide capture systems are currently being considered to mitigate the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration caused by fossil fuel combustion. The costs to implement and operate these systems must be reasonable to minimize economic impacts. In particular, the required compression systems will consume significant power, and they will require large capital investment. Advanced technol ...

New Generation IV nuclear power plants are being developed that promise to enable nuclear power to achieve its potential as a large scale source of environmentally benign power generation while improving safety and minimizing proliferation risks. These reactors will need large numbers of metallic fuel pins made from uranium alloys, but existing methods for casting these fuel pins are very costly. ...

There are over 350 thousand contaminated sites in the US which will require cleanup by both government and private industry in the next twenty years. The total cost of this environmental site cleanup is estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Amongst federal agencies the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Department of Defense (DoD) have the largest cleanup liabilities which amount ...

Many contaminated DOE sites are located in arid regions where depth to groundwater is significant and/or contaminants were discharged into a vadose zone through which transport to the groundwater table is dominated by unsteady, unsaturated groundwater flow. The absence of an effective means to monitor vadose zone moisture content in profile has been a persistent impediment to developing and calibr ...

ABSTRACT: Current separable thermal mechanical interfaces (STMIs) found in advanced digital processing electronics are unable to efficiently remove dissipated heat from the active electronics, limiting electrical performance far below their capability. The standard approach produces high thermal resistance (~1.0°C-in./W) with local variations in excess of +/-25%, severely limiting allowable ele ...

ABSTRACT: The Air Force uses specially designed facilities to perform ground testing of infrared detector focal plane arrays at Arnold Engineering Development Center (AEDC). The current approach for cooling the detectors down to 8 K utilizes liquid helium. The systems to transport and store the liquid helium are expensive to operate and wasteful due to the loss of liquid helium to boiloff. Hel ...

Increased use of Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR) combined with engine downsizing has pushed automotive turbocharger compressor operation towards and often beyond its efficient and stable operating boundaries. Much of the drive cycle is spent operating the compressor at low flow rates and low pressure ratios, near the compressor surge line, in an area which is usually of low efficiency. Our prelimi ...

In the 21st century society will need to address and resolve a large number of subsurface challenges related to energy and environmental issues. These challenges include contaminant cleanup and long term site management at contaminated sites, long term storage of nuclear fuel, carbon cycling and sequestration, production of unconventional resources (oil shales and tight gas) and water resource man ...

An enormous amount of energy from burning hydrocarbon fuels is wasted as heat in vehicle exhaust gas. The goal of this project is to improve vehicle efficiency and reduce fuel consumption by converting some of this heat into electric power. We will develop a solid state thermoelectric generator (TEG) that can efficiently produce electric power from high-temperature exhaust heat. The approach is to ...

ABSTRACT: The efficient, effective balancing of jet engine rotors and subassemblies continues to be a challenge for key aerospace applications. While manufacturing methods for balancing have improved significantly over the last ten years, measurement methods and procedures and fixturing have not advanced at the same pace. Modern jet engines require multiple parts and subassemblies to be balance ...